Wonder Hlongwa A former mayor of Pongola in KwaZulu-Natal has been made to pay King Goodwill Zwelithini a fine of 25 cattle to apologise for referring to him as “a certain man”. Derrick Sutherland, a Pongola businessman, delivered the cattle to the king’s Khangela palace in Nongoma this week to apologise for “not respecting the […]
Andy Duffy The daughter of a founding member of the Pan Africanist Congress has been stranded in Germany for nine years because she cannot prove she is South African. Joyce Vuyiswa Khayana’s struggle for a South African passport has been supported by sworn affidavits from high-ranking African National Congress and PAC officials. Even the president’s […]
Brett Hilton-Barber Racial differences between people may be a more recent phenomenon than was previously believed. In a paper presented to the Dual Congress of Human Biology and Palaeontology at Sun City this week, renowned academic Dr Christopher Stringer suggested that white skin colour probably emerged only 30 000 years ago. This is some 30 […]
Charl Blignaut On stage in Johannesburg Pieter Toerien’s Alhambra theatre is the perfect setting for a South African staging of Alan Ayckbourne’s classic Absurd Person Singular. It’s a trademark Ayckbourne nudge-nudge wink-wink; “oh-don’t-worry- about-Tom-he’s-out-there-playing-with-Dick kind of farce”, and the three couples that inhabit the three kitchens during three Christmas eve parties in the play are […]
Who is . . . Sarah Amin? Nick Hopkins and Giles Foden The last time Sarah Kyolaba Amin commanded this much attention, her life was different. As the fifth wife of the former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, she lived in splendour and travelled the world meeting dignitaries. She was even granted an audience with the […]
Brenda Atkinson I am no fan of sport. I don’t give a toss for its nation-building bumf, I begrudge it its unreserved corporate support, and it brings out the misanthrope in me. But put Bafana Bafana on the box and I’m all patriotic pride and good humour. I get butch and yell things like, “Why […]
Sam Taylor CD of the week Despite the grim utilitarianism of their name, the Dave Matthews Band are a very strange phenomenon. They are vastly successful – their first two albums, 1994’s Under the Table and Dreaming and 1996’s Crash, sold a combined total of 11- million copies in the United States; Before These Crowded […]
Peter Makurube You would need to be an incurable optimist to believe you’d ever see Philippe Troussier smile. But he did, when Bafana Bafana played Denmark. If you blinked you probably missed it. You’d have to be as much of an optimist to have believed that Tananas, one of South Africa’s best and most successful […]
Andy Capostagno Rugby What do you say about South Africa 96, Wales 13? It’s difficult to get a true sense of perspective when one team has scored 15 tries and yet is disappointed about not cracking the 100 barrier. Perspective comes with distance and on Saturday I was not at Loftus Versfeld, but at the […]
Contrary to popular opinion, speculators did not spell doom for the rand, reports Donna Block The United States Secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin, is due to visit South Africa in about 10 days time, and when he gets here he is not likely to be very sympathetic to the bleatings of the South African […]